Well, it’s time to up your training. Our next step is to keep the repetition and muscle memory going. I’ve included a PDF (right here!) of some basic strokes and brush lettering specimens to help with the uppercase and trickier lowercase letters. Feel free to use these to your heart's content and get comfortable with the brush pen.

Now that you’ve gotten comfortable with drawing the letterforms, we’re going to pick a word to letter. For my word, I’m going with the obvious here: Sidecar.

Now, the way to achieve a consistent and beautiful lettered word is not lettering it out at one time. If you can get to a point where you can, props. We’re going to draw this word over and over again, and pick out our best letterforms to combine them and create a drop-dead gorgeous piece of lettering.

Now, when carpel tunnel is about to set in, I’d say we’ve got enough to work with. Grab your guidelines that you used to draw letters from the first lesson. We’re gonna need those so our word doesn’t turn out janky (Mom will notice).

Start with the first letter of your word and trace it onto a new sheet. Continue the same process for the other letters, making sure you keep consistent angles on the stems of your letterforms using the guidelines. If you want to be more playful with your word, you can shift the baseline of some of the letters.

Now that you have your kick-ass lettered word, our next step will be to refine this thing as much as possible before we take it to the machines and vectorize. However, you can always just scan in the pencil drawing into photoshop to keep a bit of transparency or add texture. It’s really up to you.

Thanks for sticking around guys! In part three we will cover how to refine your analog version, bezier curves and how to turn this thing into something that can save the world (but probably not).